Original Xbox One

Release Dates

The Xbox One was released on 22nd November 2013 for the US, EU and some other parts of the world. It was released in Japan on September 4, 2014.

Technical

The Xbox One features a custom made eight core x86 64 bit APU (combined CPU and GPU) clocked at 1.75 Ghz and 853 Mhz respectively, build by AMD. The GPU features 12 compute units, for a total of 768 cores. It has 8GB of DDR3 RAM and (in the original configuration) a 500GB hard disk for save games and downloads. It has a BluRay disk drive and supports up to 4k video resolution.

An stereo video camera system (Kinect) has been bundled with early versions of the console; today this can be bought as an add-on.

Xbox One S

Release Date

Microsoft released a slim version of the Xbox One called Xbox One S in August 2016.

Technical Details

Except for a slightly raised GPU clock (from 853 to 914 MHz) the two versions of the Xbox One are virtually identical. Additionally it features HDMI 2.0 output instead of just HDMI 1.4 on the original.

Xbox One X

Release Date

The Xbox One X was released in November of 2017.

All previously released titles will be playable on the One X.

Technical Details

The Xbox One X is a major improvement on the predecessor. The CPU/GPU is still build by AMD but clock speeds have been increased significantly, as well as the amount of RAM build into the system:

2.3 GHz octa-core CPU

Radeon GPU with 40 Compute Units clocked at 1172 MHz

12 GB of GDDR5 RAM (9 GB available to games)

Theoretical peak performance has been raised from around 1.3 TFLOPS to over 6 TFLOPS.

Tomb Raider: Underworld (Xbox 360 version)

Controversy

After announcing that the console would have to be always connected to the internet in order to be able to play games Microsoft earned much criticism. This limitation was later withdrawn.

There have also been privacy concerns about the build in Kinect camera. Voice and gesture commands seem to be a bit unreliable, at least if the console is not set to "English" as the input language. A later version of the console came without the Kinect camera.

Also the use of DDR3 RAM in conjunction with 32 MB of Embedded Static RAM (ESRAM) to improve performance has been criticised. This bottleneck seems to have been abolished with the Xbox One X, which uses GDDR5 RAM (like the PlayStation 4.